Those who have experience with functional programming know how useful tail recursion is. It allows use to write recursive functions occupying only one stack frame for all their calls instead of taking a new frame for each call. Tail recursion is a feature that you’d rarely see in object-oriented languages and Groovy is not an exception. I’d rather say it used to be this way in an obsolete Groovy 1.7. All of us who are using a brand new Groovy 1.8 can enjoy a tail recursion substitute (not being an expert in functional programming I can’t say if it works in all cases, but it’d be interesting to look at an example where it won’t be sufficient).

The trampoline method wraps our closure into a TrampolineClosure object. Groovy executes all factorial.trampoline(..) calls sequentially until our closure returns something else than an instance of TrampolineClosure. This is amazing how useful and, at the same time, simple it is.